For Students
The following is a brief description of projects currently available. The list is not exhaustive and can be tailored to the individual students’ talents and interests.
Note: unless stated otherwise there is NO funding available for student stipends/ scholarships. The student is expected to source their own funding. Support will be provided to suitable students in making applications for scholarships.
Date created: April 2019
- Development of imaging biomarkers to monitor treatment response during radiation therapy for the purpose of adapting treatments based on response to treatment.
- In the case of prostate cancer, we already have a PhD student working on this project
- A new student would also work on the prostate data but also extended to other tumour sites.
- Radiobiological modelling of treatment response. We can access some data from a UK clinical trial where only half of the prostate was irradiated. I’m interested to know if we can detect any pre-treatment cancers that were not irradiated but did respond to treatment. Lots of modelling.
- Dose to urethra modelling. This would also involve some biological modelling. Also some anatomy of the urethra investigations. Once we can understand what the anatomy is on histology, we can transfer annotations to MRI. We could then develop an auto-segmentation algorithm to then model the optimal dose distribution around the urethra that would maximise tumour control whilst minimising dose to the urethra (we currently assume a small diameter hollow structure which is incorrect)
- My former PhD student (Yu Sun, who is now my post-doc) used machine learning techniques to determine tumour location, cell density and Gleason Grade. We would now like to re-do this work using our entire patient cohort of 60 patients. And this time, we’d like to develop models that are specific to the prostate zones (peripheral, transition & central) rather than considering the entire gland.
- Regarding option 4, one thing we haven’t done is incorporate the PSMA PET data into the models. We have limited data in the 60 patient cohort (see the Reynolds paper), but that does need analysing. We are also collecting PSMA PET data in a prospective study.
- Brachytherapy Projects. We have already developed some dose optimisation methods for LDR brachytherapy. A second project could involve developing some dose optimisation software for HDR brachytherapy.
- Hypoxia and radiogenomics. Here is our first paper on this topic. Loads more work to do here
- Translation of biological optimisation approaches to the clinic. Looking at alternative delivery methods: Halcyon (RNSH), Cyberknife (Perth), TrueBeam and protons / carbon ions. This will be a continuation of work completed by PhD student Emily Her.
- The role of PSMA PET in the BiRT framework.
Contact
Prof. Annette Haworth
Email: annette.haworth@sydney.edu.au
Office: RM 502, BLD A28, Physics Rd., Camperdown, 2006